I’ve played La Corda d’Oro 4 nine good times, and I’m not ruling out any further playthroughs. According to gamer logic, this qualifies me to give some tips for anyone considering playing it. Now that otome games are picking up popularity in the West and Koei has shown interest in bringing Ruby Party games over, you never know, maybe it will get a release someday. So here are some tips for not bombing completely when you play this game.

1. Start on Easy and work your way up to Normal if rhythm games are not your thing. Use the Easy playthrough to identify the really easy pieces like the Hallelujah Chorus, Smoke Gets in your Eyes, Someday my Prince will Come, Elsa’s Procession to the Cathedral, etc. I was too lazy to use Practice Mode much, but you can get good starting boosts that way.

2. Pick a guy and stick to him. I hear there’s a “Consolation” ending where you get dumped by one guy and comforted by the other guy, so you can date two at a time if you’re aiming for that. But no more than two. Pick and stick.

3. I stated earlier that the penalty for playing easy songs and repeated songs isn’t that severe. It isn’t at first, but the audience gets less and less forgiving the further the game goes along. Don’t play any songs under difficulty 10 in December. Don’t repeat a song more than once or twice, especially if it doesn’t fulfill an audience request. For concerts with two songs, one repeated. one new is good. For three songs, one repeated, two new is best. Do that and you should get at least A in every concert, which is enough to raise your rank.

Note that the game takes the difficulty of a piece into account, so you can botch half of a tough piece on Hard and still SSS rank the concert. So when in doubt, pick the newest, toughest songs you have in your repertoire.

4. Best way to fill the Yokohama Arena, or just rank up fast: hold a ton of concerts at the church (saves BP too!). One every weekend is fine. You can repeat a song once or twice while working on the next piece, then dive into that one, repeat it, etc. If you manage your time carefully, you’ll reach SSS rank by early to mid=December.

That gives you access to the Yokohama Arena. Filling it is another matter, but easily done as well. From the start of the game, you should be buying the photo book item that you can give to Nia in exchange for promoting your concert.

Book the hall by the 25th. Give her a photo book every day and do your normal activities. By the 29th and 30th you should be playing mastered songs and selling 1000+ tickets every day. Filling 17,000 seats will be easy, even on Hard Mode.

5. Having said all that, filling the Yokohama Arena is just for a trophy and bragging rights. It’s time consuming, and holding so many concerts gets boring. For all routes, Minato Mirai Hall should be sufficient for a successful ending. So don’t stress out. The Pacifico is good enough if you want a bit of a challenge.

If you aim for the Minato Mirai Hall, you don’t have to hold concerts that often. Once every two weeks works, and you can take your time and select pieces, walk around town and listen to requests and spending more time dating.

On that note, if you have to hold a special event for a concert and it doesn’t specify a rank to achieve, then it’s enough just to hold the concert, even if it sucks. E.g. to recruit Togane and Housei, it’s fine to get a rank C, as long as you are rank B when the concert takes place and you hold it in Kobe.

6. Hold concerts on Saturdays for best event progression. A lot of events trigger on the weekends, so having an extra weekend day after the concert is the fastest way to get started on the next event, especially after getting a boost in affection from a concert.

In the same vein, don’t rush to book the next concert after the last one. Wait and see if the next event has some special requirements. Or book the concert, but have a save standing by ready to redo as necessary.

7. Try to trigger weekend events just before the last practice session of the day. Avoid the guy until then. A couple of characters like Nanami have events that make them vanish for the rest of the day, and you won’t be able to use them in ensembles in the meantime. Super annoying.

8. Keep several saves!!!! This should be higher. Unless you’re playing with a FAQ, you WILL be blindsided by some of the requirements on the routes. E.g. you have to hold special concerts on Yagisawa’s, Kyoya’s and Togane’s routes, probably more. You may end up having to backtrack and change your concert schedule, cancel planned concerts at the last minute, or else forfeit that route altogether. To prevent all that, make a separate save every two weeks, or after every major milestone. The bottom row of saves is a useful place to store those.

9. Save scumming is not just recommended: it’s allowed. The store’s item selection is random, and some of the items are useless – especially the ones that raise interpretations. So if you need a particular score or a particular item, save and reload a few times until it appears. Tuners are especially useful. You can pick up a few trumpets as well. Don’t buy scores you don’t need, but do buy them if you have extra cash to keep them from clogging the store. Reloading also helps if a guy is supposed to appear in a certain spot but just won’t cooperate.

10. Linden Hall is not useless. You should do your first ensemble practice session with a digital tuner there. Your second as well, if you have the time to spare. Your initial sessions will drive most of the crowd away anyway, so there’s no point doing it in town. For most songs this will only be a +4 or +6 bonus to mastery, but every little helps, especially on Hard Mode.

11. Pick a type of affection and stick to it. If you’re going for “love to him” (pink), go that way exclusively. Buy ribbons every chance you get, practice together every time and use the item, etc etc.

I say this because for at least Amamiya’s route, possibly more, if you don’t trigger some events early on Amamiya’s route he’ll be blocked forever. The same probably applies to other characters, so pick an affection type and raise it as high as you can as quickly as you can’t. Don’t hold back like in La Corda d’Oro 2.

12. For PSTV users: For the BP swiping minigame, instead of chasing the hearts and BP all over the screen, keep the cursor in the middle or slightly higher and swipe across, left to right, right to left. You’ll be able to get most  of the BP and hearts that way, though you might miss a few here and there.

What I liked about La Corda d’Oro 4
♪It’s hard! I enjoyed the challenge and I enjoyed getting better at the songs the more I played the game.

♪I enjoyed most of the routes I did for the characters I liked. The only great disappointment was Amamiya.

♪They made it a little harder to get endings compared to LC3. I had to work harder for my happy endings, so I appreciated them more. But at the same time, they didn’t get as difficult and fussy as LC2.

♪They changed the townscape so you can find clusters to farm for BP more easily. I miss the old aesthetic a little bit, but this is way less frustrating and saves a ton of time.

♪I like the idea behind the series of concerts, showing how much work goes into pulling off a successful concert. Hiring the hall, doing promotions, planning the set list, etc. If anything it should have involved more work, like all the things that were mentioned in the initial concert (parking spaces, changing rooms, etc.).

♪The music selection was much better than in LC3. They have a good mix of popular classical and opera songs as well as more modern compositions like Joplin and Gershwin. Plus instead of quartets all the time, they add in the piano and bass instruments in most songs. I’d like even more instruments next time, though. Especially drums.

♪I like the character events where you build friendship between unlikely combos like Ritsu and Nanami and… presumably Arata and Myoga must exist? It would be fun to see all the events.

♪The characters comment on little things like the decor you chose, the size of the crowd, the quality of your performance, etc. It’s nice to see they noticed and cared.

♪It was nice to see Tsukimori and Tsuchiura again! More cameos next time!

What I disliked about La Corda d’Oro 4
✂Each route takes a long time. It can get a bit tiring, especially for back-to-back playthroughs.

✂Although there are two types of affection, routes play out almost the same way anyway. There are only a few places where a different event occurs because of affection-type, making it a pointless addition.

✂It’s a bit unbelievable how all the members of the Weekend Ensemble are happy to drop everything every weekend to join Kanade’s troupe, just because she’s sooo talented and sooo wonderful. The game doesn’t do much to prove that talent and wonderfulness so it makes the guys seem a bit pathetic.

✂Speaking of these pathetic guys, how fragile are their egos? You can lose their routes forever for the slightest infraction. So I didn’t watch you play the piano once. ONCE. And it’s over just like that?

✂While at least one of boys did grow impressively in his routes (Ritsu), most were just treading the same ground they did in La Corda d’Oro 3, just more annoyingly so. Myoga, Amamiya and Togane were the worst culprits in that respect.

Then there’s Nanami, who actually regressed. Sure, he got over his confidence issues, but now he’s so confident he thinks the only way to interpret a piece is the way he wants to do it. He doesn’t put it that way, but the way he cries and wails and carries on, he’s clearly feeling very hard done by, just because he has to play a song in a way he doesn’t like. Honestly he was better off in the Amane Academy concert group, where Myoga would quickly shut down that kind of nonsense. Either speak up plainly or shut up and play.

Final thoughts on La Corda d’Oro 4

It was great, really. I haven’t played a bad Kiniro no Corda game yet, though I have heard unfortunate things about Kiniro no Corda Octave. I was especially happy about the harder gameplay and the vastly improved selection of music. There’s a lot of repetition on the routes, but each one has enough new stuff to keep it fresh.

If I had to note a downside, it would be that I just don’t like the characters that much. They’re all just okay for me. Much, much better than the outright psychopaths you get in many otome games, but still not appealing capture targets for my personal tastes. TBH 90% of the reason I played so many times is the rhythm game and the challenge of filling concert halls. If rhythm games aren’t your thing and/or you don’t super-like any of the guys, this will be a tough play for you.

But since I did like the gameplay and the music, it was great for me. But would I play it again? Ehhh, I already did it 9 times, and I’m ready to move on to a new cast and new gameplay styles now.

Currently playing

Somehow or the other, I picked up Dragon Quest 7 again. Just finished Vogograd and moved on to Buccanham. What an unhappy game. I’m also playing Sanrio Characters Picross, which is Picross, so I love it. I also put my PSTV away and hooked up the PS2 again, AND found my DS charger again. But my next post will be about Granblue Fantasy because I recently hit level 175 so I might as well post an update.